Dorothy Does Hollywood

Design studio Dorothy is not based in Los Angeles. In fact, they aren’t even in America: they’re in London. They do have some attraction to Los Angeles though as they have created a series of printed works dedicated to films, movie culture, and the city we live in. They’re part tech-y, fake sciency art projects and visual cinephile meditations on beloved films, presented in clever ways. You Los Angeles movie hounds will want to snatch some of these up and toss them up in your home or office.

The studio has created two styles of prints, both dedicated to Hollywood: the first is a Film Map and the other is a Hollywood Star Chart. The film map is a reinterpretation of Los Angeles (roughly this area of Los Angeles) but everything on the map is a movie reference. Silver Lake Reservoir is Reservoir Dogs, Barnsdall is Field Of Dreams, the 5 is Lost Highway, and there are so many other clever film litterings from the Titanic at the bottom of the reservoir to Cabin In The Woods in a tree filled area called Forrest Gump. It’s super funny and looks like a passable map, slanted with an eye for 1960s cartography nostalgia.

The Star Charts do a similar mapping but with celebrities and the films that connect them. Like a huge, expansive Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon, films are placed and then leapt from actor to actor to actor, these work connections made between people mapped out like constellations. This one comes in two editions, though: a classic, Golden Era map for those into a more classic film aesthetic and a modern day edition that won’t have younger viewers scratching their heads as to who these actors are. It should also be noted that the classic one is based off of the night sky over LA on October 6, 1927 while the modern one is based off of the New York sky on June 16, 1960. Very clever, Dorothy.

The prints are for sale signed or not signed and range from £25 to £100. They’re coming a long way, yes, but they are a really great way of conceptualizing how many films have come out of the city. This would be a great gift for that movie buff you know and–duh–these will quickly become “a thing” because they look so great and have such a clever slant to them. You can see more of Dorothy’s work here.